Prior military officers were screened at headhunter hiring conferences and brought to Corning Cable Systems in Hickory, NC for followups which lasted one full work day. These interviews were one-on-one round-robin style in the interviewer's offices and lasted about 40 minutes each for about 10 interviews total. After several were hired, we collaborated to figure out how the interview process varied from interviewee to interviewee and how the decision was made to hire us. The conclusions were (a) that CCS was already planning on hiring us and the interview was a formality for us to see if we would still want to work for CCS after being in the office spaces and meeting our potential future bosses ***for prior military officers, not sure about anyone else... and (b) the questions were exactly the same for all of us and the interview process was cookie-cutter with a few questions geared by our potential supervisors about what we did in our free time (to make sure we could unwind because of the long hours ahead). The questions asked varied from completely predictable and by the book to one interviewer asking off-the-wall questions to guage the competency of the interviewee with fundamental terms (ie. name tools presented to interviewee, for instance slip-joint pliers, adjustable wrench, needle nose pliers, etc) and to see if interviewee would make answers up to questions they would likely not know the answer to... do not make stuff up during an interview. Overall, the interview was much easier than I expected, and many of the interviewers duplicated the questions of previous interviewers. I would have thought there was little planning to the interview process, but one interviewer explained that certain areas of standardized questions were grouped by skill set or character trait among the interviewers and at the end of the day, the interviewers would meet and brief each other on how the interviewee did in those areas. Bottom line, if you are a junior military officer interviewing for a Field Engineer position, prep hard for your interview but basically you are going to get hired unless you do something to make yourself look stupid (if Corning footed a bill to fly you out to site based on a hiring conference, they are not just going to throw that money out). If you are a college graduate or are transferring from another company, you need to demonstrate to your hiring manager and interviewers that you are a hard worker by nature, are goal-oriented and excited by the prospects at Corning, and are more responsible than the average person your age and experience level because there have been a few cases recently where college graduates turned out to be irresponsible with a poor work ethic and it did not work out for them for very long. Corning is a very diverse company so do not have expectations about who will be interviewing you and Corning Cable Systems is a relatively tight-knit organization, so you will likely have an interview with your departmental vice president and most of the upper level management within the office. One last piece of advice regarding the interview process... ask a lot of questions, I mean A LOT, and you will only have to answer one or two questions per interview because the interviewers really only have one or two questions they have to ask and the rest they just make up -- if you can keep them talking, you interview will be exponentially easier. Good luck.
